0 stars

Stage 5, King Edward School

A British-style farce with essentially no likable characters, As Seen on TV has a couple things going for it: they give away free crap during the “commercial breaks,” and the sauna-hot show eventually ends.

Washed-up soap opera actress Taylor Ford and her manager Larry have hired a TV studio to promote Taylor Made beauty products. Because this is supposedly her last chance to have a career, this infomercial, that is, because that makes sense, she invites her two nattering friends, dippy Autumn and self-promoting Summer. Intentionally, the three look like ’80s sitcom characters, and more than once you might think of yesteryear watching Three’s Company or Married with Children, wondering what else you might have spent that time doing, and how it is you’re still spinning your wheels on such dreck today.

Like a ball of yarn on a pile of kittens, every single detail starts to unravel, shrilly. The characters fight with each other, the makeup products turn out to have been made in Chernobyl, people get accidentally stoned, and Ford finds out she lost an important West Edmonton Mall ad campaign to her younger rival, Britney — hold on, just got to check my notes here …

You know what, forget it. This farce is just a bunch of random nouns, verbs and yelling plunged into a blender together into what feels like a couple drunk hairstylists wrote in about half an hour. Larry gets a couple good lines, and the guy running the studio and holding up the cue cards has a shrugging ambivalence I can really get behind, but despite its energy, this thing is stale, tedious, repetitive, pointless and camp without any solid tent poles. It’s like waking up in the morning and realizing you slept with Ziggy.

An aging soap actress turns to the potentially lucrative field of selling her own skincare and makeup lines on an infomercial with hilarious results. Come be part of a live studio audience and find out what the “Taylor Made” line of products can do for you!

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